Book of Destruction

by P Sachidanandan

  Not wanting to be separated from the herd, she signalled with her hand that she could not stop and moved on. But I managed to catch up with her. Through all the confusion and chaos I was somehow able to study her more closely than when I had spoken to her last time in the nurse’s quiet office. Although not young, she was an attractive woman. The air of hurry and purpose added an elegance and dignity to her demeanour. Unconsciously my eyes snagged on the pendant on the chain around her neck. Yes, this time it was clear as daylight. Not an upside-down cross, not an anchor, but a pickaxe!

  Fear clouded my vision. ‘My God, among the nurses too.’ I shuddered silently. My pace slowed, my steps faltered, but for some reason that I cannot explain, I continued following the cluster of nurses who became more and more distanced from me. I knew I would never catch up with them, and no longer wanted to.

  I emerged through another gate of the hospital complex. A number of strikers were sitting in a dharna and shouting slogans. Nurses as well as other employees. All in freshly ironed, spotless white uniforms. Nurses had their heads covered in the usual manner, and the men wore caps. The group I had been following got swallowed by the slogan-shouters, and the slogan-shouters, surrounded by a cordon of policemen, were hidden from me.

  I stood like a fool, staring at the striking staff, their gestures, posters, slogans and everything else. There were not many people to sympathize with the strikers. Only the policemen and some bystanders like me who simply stood around.

  A dead body covered in a white sheet was rolled out on a trolley, probably the first casualty of the strike. With the staff on strike, the relatives were carting it out.

  Some of the strikers got up from the dharna to hang a cloth banner on the wall behind them. I was not ready for another shock but there it was. In big, red, bold letters, the name of the workers’ union and below, the symbol of the union, not the traditional hammer and sickle, but a different tool, a pickaxe!

  The Hotelier and the Traveller

  Whether it is reality or metaphor, fact or fiction, The Book of Destruction Seshadri had talked about refused to leave my mind. And very soon I was to have a brief encounter with it, in a rather touch-and-go fashion. Its arrival seemed intentional, but the way it glanced off the surface of my life and disappeared must have been coincidental. But then, coincidence has a rather big role in this whole story. The encounter with Seshadri had been a matter of coincidence. His being in the hospital, my happening to visit my friend there and everything that happened thereafter … Going back forty-odd years, to what can I attribute my first encounter with him then? And what about his handkerchief brushing past my neck without my ever noticing it?

  But then, it is a coincidence only from the viewpoint of the victims, the bunijs. The thugs always follow their well-laid-out plans, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Thugs propose and the gods, or in fact the omens, dispose, as Seshadri would say. Omens are arbitrary. Men plan logically while the gods dispose arbitrarily. Rather, should I say creation is logical and destruction itself arbitrary? Seshadri, however, attributes everything—the acts of the killer as well as the fate of the killed—to some grand design. I do not know what is actually a coincidence, what is part of a design and, above all, what is reality and what is myth? You may say these things do not merit a discussion. But for the fact that the result is the death of a bunij, or not, as in my case, I could have dismissed the whole thing as a flight of fancy, as a myth. But premeditated attempts by the killer to kill and chance encounters with death by those who get killed are not things which can be dismissed offhand, at least not by me.

  Arthur Koestler’s Gallery of Real-Life Coincidences comes to mind. It was an interesting and harmless pastime for him. His criterion for the inclusion of an event in the gallery was that the event should otherwise be beyond explanation. But Koestler was not very rigorous in his selection, as Richard Feynman later pointed out. One of the cases in his gallery was an incident during the death of Feynman’s wife. She was recorded to have died at 9.22 and the coincidence was that the wristwatch on her bedside table had stopped at exactly 9.22. But this case did not stand up to Feynman’s scrutiny. He pointed out that the watch was a very old one, which worked only when kept in a particular position. Mrs Feynman’s nurse must have picked up the watch to note the time of death and put it back carelessly, whereupon it stopped working. What appeared to be a coincidence was easily explained with a better understanding of the circumstances. Till what point then do we attempt to solve a problem and when do we give up and declare it unsolvable? This question then transforms into a problem begging a solution. Mathematicians once believed that everything that is true can be proven. Kurt Gödel, however, with his Theorem of Incompleteness established that mathematics was not complete and truths are not always provable. So the question then became: how do we know which truth is provable and which is not? To add to the confusion of the seekers came Alan Turing’s theorem, stating that it was not possible to prove which truth is provable and which is not! When the borders are not clear we cannot call them borders. Pardon me for the digression, but it becomes significant in the light of the incident that I am about to narrate to you. Or, perhaps, who knows, as you read it, you might find these issues falling back and new ones cropping up. I should not sow more uncertainties in a story that already has enough. Let me come straight to my story. It all happened this way …

  A traveller comes to a city and checks into a hotel. He unpacks, has a bath and heads out for some fresh air, with the intention of exploring the city. Evening sets in, the street lamps turn on and one by one lights begin to appear in the windows. Suddenly he realizes that he has forgotten to take the card of the hotel with him and cannot now remember its name. He has already walked quite a bit and appears to have lost his way. After several failed attempts to locate his hotel, he goes into a nearby hotel and approaches the receptionist at the front desk. He tells her his story and gives her, to the best of his abilities, a description of the hotel he had checked into.

  The girl gives him a wide grin and informs him that this is his hotel, does he not remember? He is positive it is not. It was not such a tall building and it had no garden in front of it as this one had. Moreover, contrary to the girl’s claim, he was confident that it was not she who had checked him in. The person who had checked him in was a morose young man, wearing a white shirt and a tie, and this girl was nowhere in sight then. When he continues to protest, her smile fades, she hands him the key to ‘his’ room and with her pen points him in the direction of the lift, with an imperiousness that makes him uneasy.

  He submits, takes the key, summons the lift and goes to room number 412 as indicated on the key. To his surprise he finds all his belongings inside, innocently arranged, just as if he might have left them there. The clothes he had changed out of were in the wardrobe, the book he was reading, on the bedside table. But he is still certain this was not the room he had checked into. The bed and sheets were different. There had been only one window in the old room, and that opened on to a cluster of slums, while this room had two, one opening on to the garden and the other on to a swimming pool. But he couldn’t argue with the fact that all his belongings were here.

  This is not a story I have constructed for entertaining you. It was an experience a friend of mine had. Well, can’t really call him a friend, not even a proper acquaintance. I have had occasion to meet this man four times, always in the berth opposite mine, in the various railway coaches in which I travelled, over a period of a few years. Speak of coincidences. Hasan Ibn al Sabbah was his name, not a very common name in our country. And if that weren’t strange enough, this man bearing an unusual name, whom I had met before in bizarre circumstances, calls me in the dead of night and describes to me an experience straight out of fiction …

  I had in fact forgotten his name till he mentioned it. I had remembered the unusual circumstances and that the man had an unusual name, that was all. But he obviously remembered my name because he asked for me by name when
I picked up the receiver. He reconfirmed that I was the person whom he had met four times before in trains. After apologizing for disturbing me at that unusually late hour, he proceeded to explain that it was the odd situation in which he found himself that had prompted him to call. And how did he get my number? From the telephone directory, of course; but also, he told me, he had before him on the bedside table a packet bearing my name and address. It was on the table when he entered his new room. It was the size of a book, perhaps one with not many pages. There was a note, with no name, he added, along with the packet, requesting him to deliver it to me. He had scanned through several entries in the directory with the same name as mine, and found the one with the address on the packet and got the number. In any case, he would have dispatched it to me the next day. But then he decided to call me, he said, when the strange experience was compounded with the mysterious object and he wanted desperately to hear a familiar voice. He was glad that the person whom he got on the phone was his travelling companion of many journeys, as he put it. It all sounded perfectly logical and at the same time eerily unnerving.

  He then proceeded to tell me the whole story. He said he was in the city for a business-related court hearing the next day, regarding a dispute with his partner. Understandably, he was more than a little worried. The wrong hotel room, the domineering receptionist, then there was the packet with my name … His fears were contagious. I found myself subconsciously holding the receiver away, as if the disease could spread through the wires. If not a disease, problems could certainly spread. That packet drew me into the middle of all this, unwillingly. When I had heard the whole story I asked him, without giving it much thought, to take a taxi and come over to my place. He refused the offer saying it was already quite late; he might as well wait till the morning.

  ‘What is the name of your hotel, the present one?’ I asked.

  He laughed at that and said, ‘This time I was careful to note it: Welcome Hotel. I have also kept a card of the hotel with me, in my breast pocket.’

  I was familiar with the area; I should be able to locate it without much trouble. The shadow of his troubles now surrounded the new hotel, not the old one. It was now his reality and his problem. When a new problem hotel appears, the old problem hotel gets pushed to the back! I assured him I would meet him in room number 412 of Welcome Hotel the next morning and replaced the receiver.

  Four chance meetings in railway coaches. The second time it happened, I dismissed it as mere coincidence, the third time it was uncanny, by the fourth it had become disturbing. I did not, however, lose any sleep over it in the train. But this night was different.

  I started turning the story over in my mind. Why would a person, presumably living in this city, who knew my address, have to seek out a chance visitor to deliver a book to me? That too in a dubious hotel, as the Welcome appeared to be? The director of this drama had transferred only Hasan’s personal belongings from the previous hotel, not the furnishings themselves. This packet, which did not fall under either category, had materialized in the new room, seemingly out of nowhere. The first thing that came to my mind was that my thug (for everyone has a thug, don’t they?), Seshadri, had told me about a book called The Book of Destruction—a book from which the pages are torn out as each event described in it takes place. If this is that book and if the pages in it are not many, does it mean that the end of events—the world—is near? I was now manufacturing reasons for fear. Raise the fear, build it up systematically, Seshadri had murmured in my ears. He had warned that writers henceforth would not be able to avoid projecting fear through their writings. Am I then ordained to tell yet another story of fear? Fortuitous encounters in railway coaches, transposed hotel rooms, mysterious books, midnight calls, my God …

  I should not have invited Hasan to my house, I told myself, as my unease grew. Thank heavens he had declined. But I did go in search of Welcome Hotel the next morning.

  When I reached the approximate area and asked around for Welcome Hotel, I found, to my surprise, that everyone was eager to show me the way. As I followed the directions given, I began to notice a crowd gathering on the road, and getting thicker as I neared the hotel. And, finally, there it was, Welcome Hotel, crumbled into a heap. On top of the mountain of debris, of concrete, steel and bricks, teetered a huge board that proclaimed ‘Welcome Hotel’, seemingly untouched by the surrounding destruction, like an epitaph upon a tomb. One half of the building was still standing, sort of propped up by the mountain of debris; I counted the number of floors, seven in all. I wondered if room number 412 was in the intact half. With my friend and the mysterious packet bearing my name still inside.

  No, the fire brigade had already evacuated all the survivors in the undamaged portion and that portion too was slowly collapsing. Policemen were pushing the spectators away to a safer distance. The fearless firefighters were searching for bodies in the ruins, which were around three storeys high. Fenced in by buildings on all sides, the fallen debris had nowhere to spread. The smoke and dust had already settled. The crowd, though reluctant to disperse, was also calm. All one could hear were the shouts of the relief workers and the sounds of machines.

  It was at night that the blast had occurred, I learnt. Going by the reported time of blast doing the rounds among the onlookers, it was not long after my friend had called me last night. He had said he was going down to the restaurant and bar situated on the second floor. Which were in the collapsed portion, I discovered. So he must be lying under this heap somewhere, I guessed. I will not be meeting him on a train a fifth time. He has left behind a mystery of transposed rooms and unexplained packages. The investigations on the blast are not going to shed any light on those mysteries. My own personal mysteries, to lose sleep over.

  On an impulse, I crossed the pools of slush created by the fire hoses, and the dust and remains of the building, and found a police officer. I told him I had something to tell him.

  ‘You want to claim responsibility for this?’ was his belligerent response.

  I could appreciate the stress he was under and did not retaliate in the same tone. I said quietly, ‘A friend of mine staying in the hotel had phoned me a few minutes before the incident.’

  ‘How do you know it was before the blast?’

  ‘Because he phoned me.’

  He stared at me for some moments and then with his chin pointed me to another officer. More wading through the mud. The second officer was not much different. Still, I persisted and managed to convey my story of transposed rooms in a few brief words to him.

  ‘You are the fourth or fifth person coming to me with this nonsense. This is not April 1st, mister,’ he said, already turning away.

  ‘That doesn’t make it irrelevant,’ I insisted.

  ‘There is a register over there. You can leave your name and address there.’

  He didn’t elaborate where the register was. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to ask for it, for I myself was having second thoughts about Hasan’s story. How could all those people have got the same kind of phone call? Or was it the same person calling them all—perhaps Hasan? Did he have a premonition about the blast? I left Hasan and the book with my address on it behind me and began to walk back. Then a thought struck me—My God! Could this horrible blast have been written on the pages towards the end of the book? The pages that would be torn out after the event … now lying among the ashes …

  The official as well as the various unofficial versions of the blast filled the newspapers the next morning. Seventy-seven people had died in the incident. A number of missing persons, besides. Neither list contained Hasan’s name. The police were able to find the check-in register in the wreckage; Hasan’s name was not in it either. That gave some credibility to his story, as according to him he had checked into a different hotel.

  The explosion had taken place on the second floor which housed the restaurant, the bar and the disco. At midnight, when all three were full to capacity and late-night parties were in full swing. The
hotel had been a favourite among youngsters. The owner of the hotel, himself a young, flamboyant music lover, had been inside, the reports said. Body parts suspected to be his had been found. There was a big fire following the explosion; the fire brigade had had to fight for hours to bring it under control.

  There were also two insets in the news reports. One was titled ‘The Game of Seven’. The blast had occurred on the seventh day of the seventh month, July. There were seventy-seven dead. There were seven unidentified bodies among them. They were mostly just bits and pieces of arms and legs, and they were likely to remain so. The missing were also seven. The papers claimed that this could be a new addition to the list of coincidences in history.

  The second inset described what the police officer had told me at the site. A number of people had reported to the police that just before the blast, their friends or relatives who had checked in at other hotels were inexplicably moved to Welcome. As if they had been brought in for an execution. The police found in these stories a red herring, they said, created to divert their line of investigation.

  I paused at that. Am I also, then, one of those trying to misguide the investigation? The distracters’ list would then include not only people like me who had told such stories to the police but even their dead friends and relatives who had initially propagated this ‘red herring’, in fact, the victims of the crime themselves. I couldn’t dismiss the anxiety and fear I had so clearly heard in Hasan’s voice.

  A few days later news broke that the police had solved the case. The story was nothing short of unbelievable: the hotel owner himself was the bomber!